Jewelry Artisans Blog Carnival .... Jewellery with 'movement'

If you think about that title... most jewellery moves...  So what do I pick.... I've been playing around with enameled  pinwheels... since February, the first one I actually made properly with holes punched in all 4 'petals' as well as the center, that was amazingly difficult to do... lining  up all 5 holes and getting the headpin through them ugh... and then because the center pin was enameled in place it didn't spin..... so it was made like the toy but it didn't work.....

My eureka momment came when I realized enameled copper is not going to unfold so there is no need to pin the 'petals'... so now I have free wheeling pinwheel earrings... toys for ears!

I started making anticlastic copper bracelets last summer... these bracelets are so comfortable to wear... adding the silver spinner to them was an obvious progression... the silver wire is reclaimed silver scrap which I've melted and drawn back down to wire....

This is actually a fairly old bracelet I did a tutorial for glass line magazine on how to make the beads.... The beads are actually like an abacus in that they move back and forth on the small seed beads.. the shinny black beads act as stoppers for the big beads.

As you can tell I like to play with my jewellery!

Check out the other memebers of JAC who like jewellery with movement
Cat's Wire
Bead Sophisticate
Violet Moon
Jeanne
Nicole V

Bead Table Wednesday (BTW)

OK I'm a day late.....  This is what I'm doing for fun today...  Making myself a prototype anitclastic bangle... Don't artists always get the prototypes?

No it's not finished and the hammer still needs more shaping.. but my knuckles need a chance to recover from the hammer shaping!

Rasp 3 Knuckles 0

Even now it's a really comfortable bracelet  The directions are in 'The Workbench Guide to Jewelry Techniques' By Anastasia Young... I made my strip 8 inches not 8.25 but I also made it a bit wider

Starving Jewelry Artist Carnival Blog.... " Colour in my work!"

I love colour... lots of colour.... the brighter the better...  I am incompatible with white... I put on a pair of white pants and either spill my coffee or a cat with muddy feet climbs my leg....  Not to mention that snow is white... and I am really beginning to hate snow!

However that said when I'm doing large panels I use a lot of textured clear glass and only one or two colours... , typical window..... BUT  when it comes to beads...  I love colour....

This is actually 3 bracelets....   You've seen pictures of my glass!

Check out the Starving Jewelry Artists Blog here

Other participants in this months blog carnival.....

J3Jewelry

Beadsire

Mussings of a Northern Girl

Bead Sophisticate

FamiLee Jewels

More to come....... !

Bead Table Wednesday

This is more or less what my 'Bead Tray'  looked like last night when I finished the bracelet!  This was a 3 day project and inspite of cutting off over an inch of the spiral core .. I think it is still too long!  I really like the toggle though and can see lots of uses for it in other projects!

(The pink you see showing through the 'spikey beads' is part of the spiral weave base.

Almost wordless Wednesday

The Starving Artist Team on Etsy Sateam had a challenge in November to work with colours you don't normally work with. I like bright beads.. but this was an order, she wanted a pink and white bracelet, so I made the beads!.... and the woman I made it for loved it!

I think I would still rather have a purple or yellow bracelet... but that's just me!

Beads & More Beads

I started making beads in 1994 when I tripped over a hot head in my Wholesale flat glass catalogue… In ’94 in the middle of nowhere Canada no-one was making beads… there were no books no Internet no nothing… I credit the fact that my beads even vaguely looked like beads in those days to Kate Fowle… as she did have a video which I bought after about 7 months of wonky window glass beads…. I was a full time stained glass artist then, so had lots of glass available but most ‘art glass’ smoked horribly on a hot head and looked blechy! I can’t say that my beads become wonderful over night, after I got the video… but at least I had a vague idea what a glass bead was suppose to look like! Moving rapidly ahead 6 months I bought a Nortel Minor torch (I am still using this torch 13 years later and it works just fine!)… I had to buy it from a Neon supplier in the US as Nortel wasn’t selling them in Canada other than through Scientific supply houses. My torch arrived got all set up and I broke my left hand…. How do you make beads with a broken hand… stuff the glass rods down inside the cast… I’m sure they were awful but I still work left handed.

Tried to stick an image in here... didn't work....
Much later... not the image I had in mind... but it's progress! That bracelet is circa 2003 that was my first bead press and I called those beads finger paint tabs.....